Case Studies

Company Reduces Development Time by 84% Using Third Party Visual Studio Controls

Case Study

Jan 29, 2010

LogixPower

The Opportunity

Tom Sullivan from LogixPower, a non-profit organization located in San Diego, California uses ComponentOne Studio for ASP .NET and has enhanced an existing online application to view and create classroom events including quizzes, tests, special assignments, and other events using ComponentOne Calendar (C1Calendar) and ComponentOne Scheduler (C1Schedule).

Benefits

The pilot turned out to be a great success. The pilot’s Beta-users loved the new additions and gave LogixPower the green light to officially release this new module to its customers ahead of schedule.

“We had such a great experience with the quality of ComponentOne development tools, and the excellent support we have received from their team that we have decided to use ComponentOne for other applications LogixPower creates including, Realtime Referral,” said Sullivan. “We are about to launch a pilot project based on Silverlight and will use ComponentOne as our preferred third-party development tool vendor and their Studio for Silverlight control suite.”

Time Savings:

LogixPower had estimated that doing the modules from scratch would have taken 200 to 220 man hours. With the ComponentOne tools, the total programming effort was less than 36 man hours, a savings of 84% and 174 man hours.

Cost Savings:

From just actual coding alone, LogixPower realized $7,800 in savings due to the time saved in programming and when they included other savings such as time-to-market and freeing up valuable resources for other important tasks that had to be done from scratch, Sullivan said, “We easily could total our savings at over $15,000 by using ComponentOne Studio for ASP.NET.”

“These savings are remarkable and we intend to use other components such as the ComponentOne PDF component in our next release. We estimate our total savings for PDF handling to be around 190 man hours or $9,500.”

Overview

LogixPower created a complex suite of applications, marketed under the name ClassPower 3000, for managing schools, courses, classrooms, and communication tools. At no cost to schools, LogixPower provides access to this state-of-the-art platform.

The LogixPower development team was challenged to create an easy-to-use suite of applications for event and data-entry of different types by school administrators and teachers

“We wanted to provide a calendar that resembled Microsoft Office XP and/or Vista and behaved just like the popular Microsoft Outlook calendar," said Tom Sullivan, development lead at LogixPower. "This would eliminate the need for training the administrators and teachers because most of them are already familiar with Office applications.”

The next goal was to allow administrators and teachers to create reoccurring events with various conditions in the applications. This requirement complicated the logic behind the scene by a few folds. These two requirements would have delayed LogixPower’s time to market ClassPower 3000, and increased their development costs if they had to create the necessary components from scratch. Given that neither a delay or cost increase were an option, LogixPower had to find a solution quickly.

The Solution

As a result, the LogixPower development team began to look for an off-the-shelf tool that provided the above features, and was easy to integrate into an existing application, a breeze to manipulate at design and run-time, and provided a familiar look and feel that was easy to understand and use by the end-user.

“We looked extensively at the commercial market and tested a few of the available suites and decided to use the ComponentOne Studio for ASP .NET suite of tools,” said Sullivan. “We had never used ComponentOne tools before and were excited about the actual experience we were about to have.”

LogixPower decided to launch a pilot before they added this new module to their application on a permanent basis. Sullivan, the development lead, put one of his experienced developers on the project and gave him two weeks to come up to speed. “I was very surprised when one single developer without prior experience with ComponentOne actually managed to create the pilot in only four days,” said Sullivan. “The feedback we received from our developer was very positive and exceeded our expectations.”

I was very surprised when one single developer without prior experience with ComponentOne actually managed to create the pilot in only four days. The feedback we received from our developer was very positive and exceeded our expectations.”